Assigning stewardship for HT families to HPG vs EQ?

Discussions around using and interfacing with the Church MLS program.
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pantherjad-p40
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Assigning stewardship for HT families to HPG vs EQ?

#1

Post by pantherjad-p40 »

Does MLS currently have a way to assign households to the stewardship of the High Priest Group vs the Elders Quorum without also assigning them actual hometeachers? The reason I ask is because we have informally (not in MLS) divided the families/households of the ward into the stewardship of each quorum, however, when printing different reports or exporting HT assignments to a .csv file any family which is unassigned (despite whether or not we have decided that a given family falls within the stewardship of the EQ vs the HPG) is listed in one large list. It would be nice to divide these families so we can see statistics for visits made by each quorum with respect also to unassigned families or generally manage the assignments without viewing or dealing with all the unassigned families from the other quorum (HPG vs EQ).

It seems to me that by default the stewardship for hometeaching is that the Elders Quorum is to hometeach those households headed by an Elder and it seems that basically all other households fall to the High Priest Group? Is that correct? There are many occassions in our ward (prospective elders, etc) where the Elders have been assigned to look out for a household that might technically fall to the stewardship of the HPG. In any case, is there any way to customize the assignment of these households with respect to the hometeaching list of "unassigned households"?

As an EQP, when it comes to reviewing the unassigned households for purposes of making an assignment I want to easily classify those households that we have decided are within our stewardship vs those that are within that of the HPG and I don't want that classification to be based solely on the priesthood office of the head of household alone, as it is currently set up. Rather it would be nice to just go through the entire ward list and make a basic classification for hometeaching stewardship for a given household as for either HPG, EQ1, EQ2, unclassified, etc. That way, when making assignments it is more clear which households in YOUR own quorum STEWARDSHIP are actually unassigned.

Any feedback or discussion on this matter would be greatly appreciated and quite helpful.

Thanks.
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aebrown
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#2

Post by aebrown »

pantherjad wrote:Does MLS currently have a way to assign households to the stewardship of the High Priest Group vs the Elders Quorum without also assigning them actual hometeachers?
The simple answer is no, although some people have come up with some creative workarounds.

This was discussed at length in the thread: Unassigned families in home teaching
pantherjad-p40
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#3

Post by pantherjad-p40 »

Thank you very much. It is too bad to hear that. I will read that post.
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mkmurray
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#4

Post by mkmurray »

pantherjad wrote:It seems to me that by default the stewardship for hometeaching is that the Elders Quorum is to hometeach those households headed by an Elder and it seems that basically all other households fall to the High Priest Group? Is that correct?
The Church Handbook is pretty clear on the default stewardships, and your summarization is the jist of what it states. However, it is certainly flexible based upon inspiration of local leaders, most especially the Bishop of a unit.

There is a current Community-developed, Church-sponsored (you can't really call it open-source per se) project to build a Home Teaching/Visiting Teaching web application that units can use in place of the MLS system. There has been much discussion about the idea of stewardship apart from the actual assignments made, and if I remember right, I think this is a feature that is planned into version 1 of the web site. Here is a link to that project if you are interested further: https://tech.lds.org/wiki/index.php/Hom ... pplication

As a personal anecdote, our ward has such an extremely young demographic that would be way too daunting for the few High Priests to cover two Elders' Quorums worth of Prospective Elders; in addition we have quite a few single sisters, which is another situation that necessitates special consideration when figuring out Home Teaching stewardships.
pantherjad-p40
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Ward Demographics impact HT assignments

#5

Post by pantherjad-p40 »

Isn't it interesting how the diversity in demographics from ward to ward require a variety of customized approaches in each ward!?

Our ward is the complete opposite where our Active High Priest Group is twice the size of our Active Elders Quorum and more than half of the households in our ward are headed by High Priests, Widows, or older Elders (prospective high priests), and Prospective Elders who all "caucus" with the High Priests and fall within their assigned stewardship.

So, nearly 2/3 of the unassigned families (of which there are a lot due to a recent reorganization in ward boundaries yielding a lot of new inactive unknown names) fall within the stewardship of the HPG and as a New Elders Quorum leader in a newly reorganized ward (being new to the ward myself anyway) it is a headache to sift through them without a clear delineation in MLS of which quorum a household has been assigned (all I have is a notation on a copy of a ward list!).

Fortunately, nearly all of the unknown households fall within our stewardship because the High Priest Group are familiar with most the older members in the area whereas the younger households remain a mystery to everyone, such that once the HPG gets organized with its HT assignments, most of their unassigned households will have become assigned leaving us with our stewardship families alone unassigned. I only wish we had enough hometeachers to assign all the families, I suppose that means we need to do some serious reactivation!
vincejebsen-p40
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#6

Post by vincejebsen-p40 »

After reading the link, I'm quite surprised that such a thing really happens. Well, it's really not a perfect world.
RossEvans
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#7

Post by RossEvans »

vincejebsen wrote:After reading the link, I'm quite surprised that such a thing really happens. Well, it's really not a perfect world.

We don't even have any clear indication that fixing this flaw in MLS is on a to-do list. Since the high-level plan is to supersede all home-teaching functionality in MLS with the new web-based application -- which offers new benefits but also new drawbacks -- there may be no action item for retrofitting MLS itself. At least this particular problem may be addressed in the web app, as mkmurray mentions.
jbh001
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#8

Post by jbh001 »

pantherjad wrote:Does MLS currently have a way to assign households to the stewardship of the High Priest Group vs the Elders Quorum without also assigning them actual hometeachers?
No.

But you can create a custom home teaching companionship for EQ and also one for HP that has one of the presidency (or the bishop, etc.) as the home teacher, and then assign these families to it. That way the "unassigned" families that show up at the end are truly unassigned and need to be designated which quorum has the responsibility.

After a household has been assigned home teachers, you can see which priesthood quorum they have been assigned to by doing one of the following:

From the MLS menu bar, navigate to Organizations > High Priests > set the Show: dropdown box to Assigned Households.

Or, from the MLS menu bar, navigate to Organizations > Elders > set the Show: dropdown box to Assigned Households. If you have more than one elders quorum, you can then select which elders quorum to display.
bbs34
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Re: Assigning stewardship for HT families to HPG vs EQ?

#9

Post by bbs34 »

I see this is an old thread, has any of the updates to the website allowed the use of moving wither ep or hp is steward over a family
russellhltn
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Re: Assigning stewardship for HT families to HPG vs EQ?

#10

Post by russellhltn »

bbs34 wrote:I see this is an old thread, has any of the updates to the website allowed the use of moving wither ep or hp is steward over a family
The situation is unchanged - you can assign a family HT from either quorum. But you can't change the default responsibility of a "unassigned" family.
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